Why is it the property owners reponsibility to go find and talk to the drone operator? The drone operator, on the other hand, knows where his toy is going so maybe HE should actually act like a responsible person and let the property owners know what he is doing ahead of time.

If he was doing something potentially invasive or that would legitimately cause the owner to worry.

If he's just flying in the area than you're effectively advocating the banning of drones in municipal areas. Even flying in your own backyard could potentially be looking out at the entire neighbourhood.

I wonder that the video and data didn't go up immediately. A couple of days is enough to edit the telemetry and video. Maybe they're honest, maybe they're not. However, it seems really unlikely that someone would be massively offended by a drone 70 meters up.

If they were going to file charges against anyone, it was really stupid for the police not to impound the drone as evidence.

It's a viral news story, are you really shocked the drone owner took a week to decide he wanted to talk to the media and give them a presentation?

Heck, maybe he has a job and simply didn't have time until the weekend.

dmr001 writes: The US Department of Defense opted not to use the Department of Veterans Affairs' open source popular VistA electronic health record in its project to overhaul its legacy systems, instead opting for a consortium of Cerner, Leidos and Accenture. The initial $4.3 billion implementation is expected to be the first part of a $9 billion dollar project. The Under Secretary for Acquisition stated they wanted a system with minimum modifications and interoperability with private sector systems, though much of what passes for inter-vendor operability in the marketplace is more aspirational than operable. The DoD aims to start implementation at 8 sites in the Pacific Northwest by the end of 2016, noting that "legacy systems are eating us alive in terms of support and maintenance," consuming 95% of the Military Health Systems IT budget.

[Mozilla Foundation] "inflicted Australis on the world and changed the default search engine to Yahoo".

Mozilla Foundation lost its $300,000,000 yearly income when Google stopped paying to have Google the default search engine. Now most, or almost all, of Mozilla Foundation's money comes from Microsoft, through Yahoo.

This is the new arrangement: Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually Microsoft Bing search) the default search engine in Firefox. Most people don't have the technical knowledge to know how they've been manipulated, or how to restore the default search engine to Google search.

Mozilla Foundation has apparently allowed deliberate damage to the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs. Every time you do a file save, the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed.

Was that done because Microsoft wanted it? Is that another example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that what Microsoft is trying to accomplish?

Slashdot discussions usually don't handle software abuse well. Often those with technology experience don't see that abusers are interested in abusing most people, while avoiding annoying those who would have the technical experience to complain by providing a technical way to avoid that particular abuse.

You are connecting a very, very remote area of Russia with a very, very remote area of the US. Take a look at a population density map, there's no cities whatsoever nearby. And long distance shipping will either go by sea (cheaper) or plane (faster), just the maintenance on thousands of miles of rail would kill it. This is as likely as the head of NASA suggesting a manned mission to Mars, it's his idea to make lofty ideas but the people with the money will never fund it.

Slashdot discussions don't handle software abuse well. Often those with technology experience don't see that abusers are interested in abusing most people, while avoiding annoying those who would have the technical experience to complain.

Why? The people who had the foresight, work ethic, and brains to create or own the robot workforce have NO legal, ethical, or moral reason to "share" the fruits of their labors (or laborers) with others

Because in a world where 99% of the people are literally unemployable (because anything they can do, a robot can do better and cheaper), the alternatives are grim -- either mass starvation, or civil war.

If you want a piece of the pie, work your ass off and buy a piece, or go and make a pie of your own.

Yes, I'm familiar with the standard conservative moralizing. But that approach only works in a world where those actions are possible, and in the scenario we are discussing, they won't be.

There is nothing inherent to being "artificial" that should cause intelligence to be necessarily more hostile to mankind than a natural intelligence is, so while the idea might make for intriguing science fiction, I am of the opinion that many people who express serious concerns that there may be any real danger caused by it are allowing their imaginations to overrule rational and coherent thoughts on the matter.

Except for several characteristics that are specific to artificial intelligence.

3) Natural intelligence has certain weaknesses such as basic math, artificial intelligence will lack many of these weaknesses.

4) Natural intelligence has ethical constraints developed by millions of years of evolution and a highly developed education process, sociopaths are quite rare and usually harmless. We have no idea how to encode such an ethical system into an artificial intelligence.

It depends a lot on what the artificial intelligence looks like but we would be dealing with a fundamentally different kind of consciousness, it could be innocuous or extremely dangerous.